{"id":8844,"date":"2017-12-09T14:55:45","date_gmt":"2017-12-09T21:55:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/BigJimIndustries.com\/wordpress\/?p=8844"},"modified":"2017-12-10T15:02:31","modified_gmt":"2017-12-10T22:02:31","slug":"bitcoin-causing-global-warming","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2017\/12\/09\/bitcoin-causing-global-warming\/","title":{"rendered":"Bitcoin Causing Global Warming"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/grist.org\/article\/bitcoin-could-cost-us-our-clean-energy-future\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>from grist<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n<h1>Bitcoin could cost us our clean-energy future<\/h1>\n<p>By <a class=\"author url fn\" title=\"Posts by Eric Holthaus\" href=\"https:\/\/grist.org\/author\/eric-holthaus\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"author noopener\">Eric Holthaus<\/a><\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/-ajgm0PTegs\" width=\"480\" height=\"272\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>If you\u2019re like me, you\u2019ve probably been ignoring the bitcoin phenomenon for years \u2014 because it seemed too complex, far-fetched, or maybe even too libertarian. But if you have any interest in a future where the world moves beyond fossil fuels, you and I should both start paying attention now.<\/p>\n<p>Last week, the value of a single bitcoin broke the $10,000 barrier for the first time. Over the weekend, the price nearly hit $12,000. At the beginning of this year, it was less than $1,000.<\/p>\n<p>If you had bought $100 in bitcoin back in 2011, your investment<a href=\"https:\/\/www.investopedia.com\/articles\/investing\/123015\/if-you-had-purchased-100-bitcoins-2011.asp\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> would be worth\u00a0<\/a>nearly $4 million today. All over the internet there are stories of people who treated their friends to lunch a few years ago and, as a novelty,<a href=\"http:\/\/time.com\/money\/4788066\/bitcoin-price-worth-value-pizza-invest\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> paid with bitcoin<\/a>. Those same people are now realizing that if they\u2019d just paid in cash and held onto their digital currency, they\u2019d now have enough money to buy a house.<\/p>\n<p>But the rise of bitcoin is also happening at a specific moment in history: Humanity is <a href=\"http:\/\/www.independent.co.uk\/environment\/world-zero-carbon-emissions-before-2040-two-decades-climate-change-global-warming-greenhouse-gases-a7682001.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">decades behind schedule<\/a> on counteracting climate change, and every action in this era should be evaluated on its net impact on the climate. Increasingly, bitcoin is failing the test.<\/p>\n<p>Digital financial transactions come with a real-world price: The tremendous growth of cryptocurrencies has created an<a href=\"https:\/\/blockchain.info\/charts\/hash-rate\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> exponential demand for computing power<\/a>. As bitcoin grows, the math problems computers must solve to make more bitcoin (a process called \u201cmining\u201d) get<a href=\"https:\/\/blockchain.info\/charts\/difficulty?timespan=all\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> more and more difficult<\/a> \u2014 a wrinkle designed to control the currency\u2019s supply.<\/p>\n<p>Today, each bitcoin transaction requires the same amount of energy used to power\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/digiconomist.net\/bitcoin-energy-consumption\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">nine homes in the U.S. for one day<\/a>. And miners are constantly installing more and faster computers. Already, the aggregate computing power of the bitcoin network is<a href=\"https:\/\/www.reddit.com\/r\/Bitcoin\/comments\/5kfuxk\/how_powerful_is_the_bitcoin_network\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">nearly 100,000 times larger<\/a> than the world\u2019s 500 fastest supercomputers combined.<\/p>\n<p>The total energy use of this web of hardware is huge \u2014 an estimated<a href=\"https:\/\/digiconomist.net\/bitcoin-energy-consumption\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> 31 terawatt-hours<\/a> per year. More than <a href=\"https:\/\/powercompare.co.uk\/bitcoin\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">150 individual countries in the world<\/a>\u00a0consume less energy annually. And that power-hungry network is currently increasing its energy use every day by about 450 gigawatt-hours, roughly the same amount of electricity the entire country of Haiti uses in a year.<\/p>\n<p>[ <a href=\"https:\/\/grist.org\/article\/bitcoin-could-cost-us-our-clean-energy-future\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">click to read full article at grist<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>from grist Bitcoin could cost us our clean-energy future By Eric Holthaus If you\u2019re like me, you\u2019ve probably been ignoring the bitcoin phenomenon for years \u2014 because it seemed too complex, far-fetched, or maybe even too libertarian. But if you have any interest in a future where the world moves beyond fossil fuels, you and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8844","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weirdness"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8844","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8844"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8844\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8844"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8844"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8844"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}